Evil Spy School

by Stuart Gibbs

  Warren glowered jealously, as he always did whenever Zoe showed me any affection.

  “What’s the problem?” I asked.

  “We’re trying to take out the enemy mortar base, but we can’t get the targeting right,” Zoe reported.

  “We’ll handle it,” Erica said, then pointed to Zoe and ordered, “Stay on guard.” Then she pointed to me and ordered, “Work out the trajectory.” Then she pointed to Warren and ordered, “Move. You’re in my space.”

  Warren scurried out of Erica’s path, meekly holding out the instruction manual. “Do you need this?”

  Erica rolled her eyes. “Please. I’ve known how to operate a mortar since I was in preschool.”

  With most people, this would have been an exaggeration. With Erica, it probably wasn’t. Her father had once showed me a baby picture of her playing with nunchucks. Erica instantly began making adjustments to the cannon.

  I turned to Warren and grinned confidently. It was now my time to shine. I might not have been as great a warrior as Erica, but when it came to math, no one else at spy school could hold a candle to me. I had level 16 skills, which meant I could do extremely complex computations in my head and never forgot a phone number. At normal school, this was the kind of thing that not only failed to impress my fellow students but often got me shaken down for my lunch money. At the Academy of Espionage, however, there were sometimes occasions—such as aiming a mortar—where being good at calculus made you kind of cool.

  “How far is the enemy base?” I asked.

  “One hundred sixty-five meters,” Warren replied.

  “Charge?”

  “Two hundred pounds of thrust.”

  “Weight of the shell?”

  Warren frowned. “Is that important?”

  “Only if you actually want to take out the enemy rather than our own team,” Erica muttered. Then she told me, “Standard shell weighs sixteen pounds.”

  “Wind speed?” I asked.

  “Fifteen miles an hour,” Zoe reported. “Coming directly from the southwest.”

  I took a second to make my mental calculations, then another second to double-check my work. “We need a launch angle of seventy-three degrees, aiming six degrees right of the target.”

  “Roger.” Erica started orienting the mortar.

  “Nice work!” Zoe told me. “Thanks for bailing us out, Smokescreen.”

  “We don’t know if he’s right yet,” Warren muttered sullenly.

  “Of course he is,” Zoe shot back. “I’d trust Smokescreen before my own calculator.”

  I started for the pile of ammunition, but Warren leapt into my path. “I’ll handle that!” he snapped. “Firing this is my job!”

  I stepped back, knowing Warren was desperate to prove his worth. While he grabbed a paint bomb, I jammed in some earplugs and borrowed Zoe’s binoculars to scan our surroundings. Below us, the battlefield was laid out in an oddly perfect rectangle. At the edges, the dirt and debris stopped abruptly and the green lawns of campus began. It was like a little slice of Beirut had been dropped in the middle of Washington, DC. Behind me, the Gothic buildings of the academy ringed the north end of the battlefield, dominated by the five-story Nathan Hale Administration Building. For a mile on each side around us was untouched forest, providing plenty of land for our normal war games—as well as a barrier between us and the outside world, which swallowed up the sounds of battle. (The academy’s official reason for existence was a highly guarded secret, so the campus had its own secret identity: St. Smithen’s Science Academy for Boys and Girls.) The reviewing stands sat on the western side of the field. Beside them, the students who’d been “killed” were gathered, rooting on their respective teams. Since most of the “corpses” were now colored blue or red, they had the look of game pieces gathered along the edge of a Risk board.

  There were a lot more blue-spattered corpses than red ones, which meant our team was winning. This was mostly due to Erica, who had more kills than everyone else on our team put together. However, Chip and Jawa were currently leading the remaining reds in an assault on our flag, aided by their own mortar, which their team was doing a decent job of operating. As I watched, a red paint bomb detonated only a few feet from our flag, taking out half of our defenders.

  Erica observed this too. “Are you sure you’re right, Ben?” she asked. “If we don’t take out their mortar with this shot, they’ll win with their next blast.”

  I was sure, but I rechecked my math one last time, not wanting to make a fool of myself in front of Erica. “It’ll work,” I assured her.

  “All right.” Erica stepped away from the mortar and joined Zoe and me at the edge of the base. Rather than watch Warren set off the mortar, she lifted her paintball gun to her shoulder and began picking off the red team members swarming toward our flag.

  “Stand back!” Warren warned us, clutching the remote trigger. “Detonation in five seconds. Four . . .”

  Erica suddenly stopped shooting, concerned. She spun back toward the mortar, sniffing the air.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “That idiot put a live round in there!” Erica cried, springing at Warren.

  I leapt into action as well. There was no time to ask Erica how she’d determined Warren had screwed up; knowing her, she could smell the difference between a live munition and a fake one. The fact was, I’d calculated the right trajectory, meaning the mortar was about to reduce several of my fellow students to tiny pieces.

  Thankfully, before Warren could fire, Erica slammed into him, knocking him flat. Unfortunately, Warren interpreted this attack as some sort of spy school trick.

  “Help!” he squawked, struggling for control of the trigger. “She’s a double agent for the red team!”

  In Warren’s defense, this was exactly the sort of ruse the faculty at spy school played all the time. If it had been anyone but Erica, I might have doubted her intentions as well.

  I left Erica to handle Warren and turned my attention to the mortar itself. The cannon sat on a rotating platform. I pulled the pin that locked it into place, then threw my shoulder into the barrel. It spun more easily than I’d expected, swiveling quickly away from me . . .

  Just as Warren wrenched the trigger away from Erica and depressed it. “Fire!” he screamed triumphantly—and only then bothered to check to see where the cannon was aimed.

  The mortar roared. It was so loud that even with my earplugs in, I felt as though my brains might vibrate out of my head. The shell exploded out of the barrel, arcing into the air away from the battlefield.

  And right toward the Nathan Hale Building.

  The entire war zone immediately fell silent. Every student and faculty member stopped what they were doing to watch the disaster unfold.

  The bomb peaked several hundred feet in the air and then whistled downward, slamming into the Hale Building’s roof directly above the principal’s office.

  Erica had been right. It wasn’t a paint bomb. It was a live round.

  The explosion blasted a huge chunk out of the building. Brick and tile flew through the air. A gargoyle rocketed across Hammond Quadrangle and embedded in the wall of the armory.

  When the smoke cleared, there was a divot thirty feet across right where the principal’s office had been.

  I cringed and looked to Erica. “What’s the chance that the principal was up there?”

  “Well, he’s supposed to be down here in the reviewing stands,” Erica said. “But the chances of the principal being in the right place at the right time aren’t usually very good.”

  A howl of rage suddenly echoed from the blast site.

  I raised the binoculars and saw the principal stagger out of the remains of his office bathroom. His clothes were charred black and the toilet seat was around his neck, but he appeared to be all right. Enraged, but all right.

  “Who is responsible for this?” he bellowed. “Find them and bring them to me!”

  Zoe and Erica looked to me with genuine con
cern in their eyes. Warren, however, couldn’t hide his glee. “Oooh,” he taunted. “Ben, you’re in trouble!”

  And for once, I knew Warren was actually right.

  EXPULSION

  CIA Academy of Espionage

  Nathan Hale Administration Building

  September 3

  1145 hours

  Ten minutes later, I was in the principal’s office. Or at least what was left of it.

  It probably wasn’t the best idea to be in a fifth-story room that had just suffered severe structural damage, but the principal, who didn’t think clearly on normal occasions, was so enraged that he’d apparently ceased thinking at all. I’d seen him angry plenty of times before (not to mention confused, baffled, perplexed, dumbfounded, and completely flummoxed), but those were mere drizzles of irritation compared to the thunderstorm of fury he was experiencing now. He was so determined to unleash his wrath on me that he hadn’t even changed out of his scorched clothes. Bits of his tie and sports jacket were still smoldering, leaving tiny contrails of smoke as he paced around the remains of the office. His toupee had been fried black and looked like an overdone steak perched atop his head. But then, the principal’s toupee was normally so awful, this was actually an improvement.

  “Look at this room!” the principal shrieked. “Look what you did to it! Do you see what you’ve done to my desk?”

  “Er . . . no,” I said. “Your desk isn’t there anymore.” Instead, where the desk had been, there was only blue sky and a massive hole in the floor leading to the dean of Chemical Warfare’s office below.

  “Exactly!” the principal screamed. “That desk was an extremely important piece of espionage history. It was first used by Sidney Grimble, the founder of this academy, and it has been used by every principal since! It was a priceless artifact—and you blew it to pieces!”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I should say you’re sorry! If it hadn’t been for my keen ears and my lightning reflexes, I would have been killed!”

  This was a lie. Since I’d seen the principal emerging from his bathroom after the blast, I knew that he’d literally been caught with his pants down. It was only sheer luck that he’d been seated on the toilet, rather than at his desk, when the bomb struck.

  It might be surprising that, even though the principal worked in intelligence, he wasn’t actually that intelligent himself. Or that, of all people, he’d been the one selected to run a school. But the fact was, no one joined the CIA to become a principal. It was a job no one wanted—and therefore, a dumping ground for agents no one wanted. Most other organizations would have just fired an incompetent employee. But the CIA was run by the government, where incompetent people didn’t merely avoid being fired; they were often elected to high offices.

  “I wasn’t trying to hit your office,” I explained. “I was trying to prevent some students from getting blown up.”

  The principal paused for a moment, as though weighing whether saving a few students’ lives was worth the loss of his desk. “Why were you even firing live ammunition during a fake battle in the first place?”

  “I wasn’t. Another student loaded the cannon.”

  “It’s not very professional to shirk responsibility,” the principal scoffed. This, from a man who’d swiped the dessert from his secretary’s lunch bag for a year and then tried to pin it on the janitorial staff.

  “I’m not shirking anything,” I argued. “I’m telling you the truth. Warren Reeves was in charge of the mortar. Erica Hale and I were helping him. Or trying to. Warren insisted he could load and fire the mortar by himself. But he put a live shell in, rather than a paint bomb . . . .”

  “How?”

  “I have no idea. You had me brought up here before I had a chance to find out.” Less than two minutes after the misfire, two very big men from campus security had arrived at the mortar base and demanded I accompany them to the principal’s office. “Erica was the one who realized the ammo was live.”

  “And yet I notice that she didn’t blow up my office.”

  “She was trying to stop the triggerman. While she handled that, I reoriented the mortar from the other students.”

  “And you aimed it at a building instead? Because the whole point of buildings is that they generally have people inside of them.”

  “Not today,” I protested. “This building was supposed to be empty. The SACSA exams were mandatory for all students and faculty.”

  “What idiot said that?”

  “Uh . . . you did.”

  The principal was already crimson with anger, but now he shifted into a color of red I hadn’t known humans could be. A kind of blazing molten-magma red. Before he could explode at me, I reached into my pocket and pulled out the letter that had been sent to my home at the end of the summer. The one stating that attendance at the SACSA exams on the first day of school was mandatory for all students and faculty. It was signed by the principal himself. “You see?” I asked, holding it up.

  The principal froze, mouth agape, a half second from reading me the riot act. He was so red already, I couldn’t tell if he was embarrassed or angry at me for revealing that he’d messed up. I could almost hear the wheels in his brain turning as he tried to figure out what to do next. Finally, he said, “You’re expelled from school.”

  “What?!” I gasped. “Why?”

  “Because you blew up my office!” The principal waved a hand at the space where his wall had been. “You honestly think I’d let you stay here after a screw-up like this?”

  “But it wasn’t my fault!”

  “You just admitted that you aimed that cannon here.”

  “There were people in danger,” I protested. “I had to do something.”

  “Well, you should have done something else,” the principal countered.

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Something that didn’t involve nearly killing me while I was on the toilet!” The principal caught his mistake, then desperately tried to backpedal. “I mean, something that could have killed me while I was on the toilet, had I been there . . . which I wasn’t. I was here, in my office, doing important things, and then cleverly took cover in the bathroom when I heard the incoming mortar round. The point being, your behavior was rash and poorly thought out . . . .”

  “There was no time to think!”

  “That’s never stopped me,” the principal snapped. “I rarely take any time to think at all, and yet you don’t see me blowing up people’s offices.”

  With most people, I would have chalked a statement like that up to them being too angry to get their thoughts straight, but the principal’s thoughts were usually more jumbled than a plate of linguini.

  “So,” I said, “if I had just stood there and let those other students get killed, then I wouldn’t be getting expelled right now?”

  The principal mulled that over, then completely dodged the question. “Look, I’m not in favor of killing students. In fact, I’m against it. But we are training people to be spies here, and when you’re a spy, there are many instances where life hangs in the balance. The CIA needs people who can handle those situations, people who won’t crack under pressure, people who can save lives without nearly killing other people.”

  “I’ve done that,” I said sullenly. “In fact, I’ve done it twice. I defeated the plans of SPYDER two times . . . .”

  “SPYDER?” the principal asked blankly.

  “The evil organization that tried to blow up this school a few months ago,” I reminded him. “Only I thwarted them, saving dozens of lives—including yours. And then I thwarted them again last summer, saving even more people—including the president of the United States. In fact, I’m the only student at this school who has done anything like that. And you’re expelling me? Because I blew up your stupid office?” It probably wasn’t the best tone to take with the principal, but I was upset and angry and already expelled, so it wasn’t as though I could get into more trouble.

  “This isn’t b
ecause you blew up my office!” the principal said defensively. “It’s because you nearly killed me! You might have defeated SPYDER, but you are also reckless, dangerous, and insubordinate. There is no place at this school for students like you. Therefore, you are officially dismissed from the Academy of Espionage. Go clean out your dorm room. Security will escort you off campus.”

  With that, the principal turned his back on me, signaling that our conversation was over. Normally, he would have turned his attention to something on his desk, but now he realized he had no desk—or much of anything else left in his office—so he simply stood there, unsure what else to do, while waiting for me to leave.

  I was heading for the door when the principal spoke again. “There’s one more thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “We are taking a very big risk by turning you loose into normal society. Even though you are no longer welcome at this academy, it is still imperative that you keep its existence a secret. If you tell anyone of its true nature—or that you were ever training to be a spy at all—there will be consequences.”

  “Go jump in a lake,” I said. It wasn’t like he could expel me again.

  Then I walked out the door.

  Behind me, I could hear the principal screaming something else in rage, but I tuned him out. I walked away, down the long, dark corridor of offices.

  This part of the building had withstood the blast quite well. There were a few new cracks in the walls, and most of the portraits of famous spies were now a bit crooked, but other than that, everything looked just the way it always did.

  As I passed the last office, Alexander Hale exited it, holding a cardboard box. He froze upon seeing me, looking embarrassed and unsure what to do. Alexander was Erica’s father. When I’d first met him, on the day he’d recruited me to spy school, he’d been the most decorated agent of his generation: suave, dashing, and debonair. However, I had soon learned that Alexander was a fraud. In truth, he was a lousy spy who’d based his entire career on stealing the credit from others—and he’d made several critical mistakes that had severely jeopardized our missions. After Erica and I mentioned these in our debriefings, Alexander’s career had taken a nasty hit. He’d been stripped of his medals and commendations and fired from the Agency. I hadn’t seen him since. Now it appeared he’d returned to clear out his office. He looked like a mere shell of the man he’d been before. His normally pristine suit was rumpled, his shirt was untucked, and there was a mustard stain on his tie. He had a week’s growth of beard on his chin and a great deal of sadness in his eyes.